[OTR-users] Re: Perfect Forward Secrecy

[Jason Cohen]

I actually have read the paper, and OTR does indeed seem very clever. I
suppose my problem is that I don't fully understand how Diffie Hellman
Agreement can do what it does. I can understand RSA/DSA which creates a
public/private keypair on one machine and then distributes the public
key (I understand how PGP works), but the concept of realtime key
generation over an insecure network is baffling. I suppose it would be
nice if I could better understand the math involved. Could someone
explain how Diffie Hellman works to a social-science undergraduate? It
would be greatly appreciated.

Jason